Startling Domesticity
by HoVis
Summary: Lois realises that her hero is, after all, just a costume hanging above a sink in a Metropolis apartment. Please R and R!


**A/N:** Hello all! This is my first contribution to the Lois and Clark section of I do hope this is alright! This is set some time after Lois has discovered Clark's 'true identity', though this may not be strictly 'canonical' since (apart from those I saw when I was eight) I have only in recent memory seen about four episodes of Lois and Clark. I have however read as many episode synopses and fanfictions as I can! This was inspired by the slightly tongue-in-cheek scenes in 'Lois and Clark' where Clark is standing talking to his Mom on the phone and cleaning _the suit_. I hope you enjoy!

**Disclaimer:** Sadly, I don't even own any DVDs of this fantastic show. The characters and ideas are borrowed and will be replaced, hopefully without any wear and tear (though the suit may be a little muddy).

**Startling Domesticity**

Lois let herself into Clark's apartment and stopped in utter surprise at the incongruously domestic scene which met her eyes. Clark was standing in the middle of the kitchen, a phone in one hand – which was ordinary enough – but in his other hand he held _the suit_. As she stood and watched, he laughed at something the speaker on the other end had said and fixed the phone between his shoulder and his ear, using his newly freed hand to sponge something of _the suit_. He glanced up, saw Lois, waved and mouthed the word 'Mom' – who was presumably at the other end of the line.

"Somehow, Mom, I'm not sure that would be the best idea – didn't you say last time they all asked about my 'odd disappearances'?" He paused, using the time to hang _the suit_ up and pick up... another suit. Lois was still rooted to the spot. He had more than one?

"Yes, Mom," Clark continued, rolling his eyes at Lois, "_no_, Mom." He frowned slightly at an apparently stubborn piece of dirt on the _second_ suit, and Lois shook her head hopelessly as she spied a third blue-and-red suit lying across the sink. By the looks of it, it had been the victim of a mud-slide, so much so that Lois could barely make out the bright yellow emblem on the chest or the back of the cape. Silently, she moved across the room and fingered it, wondering why she was so surprised to see Clark Kent cleaning Superman's suits. She knew the two were one and the same, after all. And yet, and yet –

"Well, Mom – ah, Lois, I wouldn't touch that, you'll get filthy, I'll deal with it later – yeah, Mom, Lois is here, do you want to talk to her?" He paused for a moment, then grinned at Lois. "Mom says are you alright?"

Lois nodded a little numbly.

"Sure. Just... swell." Clark started at her response, frowning slightly.

"Say, Lois – _are_ you alright?" His Mom must have said something, for he looked across at Lois askance. "Sure, Mom, I'm cleaning my suits, didn't you see that mud-slide on the news? Why should that..." he trailed off, then shrugged at Lois, holding out the phone. "Mom says she needs to, ah, 'have a mother to daughter chat with you'." He looked mystified, then, just as Lois took the phone, flushed. "And I'm not listening in, Mom!"

Lois was confused at first, then realised – of course, he was _Superman_, he didn't _need_ to have the phone to his ear to hear what was coming out of its speakers. Hell, he hardly needed a phone at _all_ to hear someone, even if they were half a world away.

"Lois," Martha Kent's voice came through the phone, fond and kind, and Lois felt a strange rush of affection for the woman who had without question accepted her into her family. "I take it that you've been a little taken aback by Clark's habit of scrubbing his suits, hmm?"

Lois shrugged, then remembered that Clark's Mom couldn't see her. She sighed. It was a pity Martha Kent was so fond of Smallville – she would have made a pretty good investigative reporter with her obvious perceptiveness. Lois mused that maybe that was where Clark got his not-considerable talent from, before remembering that Martha and Jonathon were not Clark's biological parents. Why was she finding it so hard to reconcile the two halves of the man she loved?

"A – a little, Mrs Kent."

"Martha, please, Lois – you're practically family, there's, no need for formality." Her tone softened. "Is it strange to see the hero you adored for a very long time reduced to a costume hanging in a sink?"

Lois' eyes widened, and she knew by the fact that Clark's eyes did too that he _had_ been listening, inadvertently or not. She also realised that she had no secrets from Martha Kent – she had heard from her son every facet of their relationship, both as Superman and Clark Kent, before Lois had even known the two were one and the same. She knew that Lois had ignored, vilified, and mocked Clark whilst hankering after the hero and the costume, and she did not judge her. Lois had never been like that. She had always made judgements and taken her own opinions from facts, often turning her into a human force to be reckoned with when she was on a story which she thought would expose injustice or falsehood.

"A – a little, Martha." Internally, Lois groaned at her own lack of eloquence. And she called herself a _writer_. In a farmhouse in Smallville, Martha Kent chuckled.

"Do you know, Lois," she said, as Lois, half-listening, glanced between Clark and the suit in his hand, wonderingly, "the first time I saw a picture of Superman in the _Smallville Gazette_, I was shocked. But not because I was surprised to see my son in the newspaper – I was shocked because I hardly recognised him. Do you understand?" Clark was trying _really_ hard not to listen now, Lois realised with a smile – he was studiously looking away and fiercely scrubbing at a stain on his 'secondary suit' as she had already dubbed it. It was slightly different, she noted with astonishment but not unease – the cape was a little shorter that that of the other and the emblem slightly larger. How had no one noticed? How had _she_ not noticed, and why had it never entered her imagination that Superman would, of course, have to was his suits?

"Lois?" Martha pressed, and she shook herself from her reverie.

"Sorry, Martha – I, no, I don't really understand."

"Okay." Martha Kent sighed, but it contained no criticism of Lois. "Let me put it another way – _Clark is a very good actor_. Do you understand?"

Lois felt like she was touching the ground after a very long time in the air. Touching earth was not as exhilarating as flight, but it was humbling, and it held its own flashes of truth and understanding.

"Oh." She said, letting out a breath. She loved Clark, she knew this. But she had still held onto the idea that a small part of him was still Superman, that he just played a different side of himself, and yet now she realised how foolish and childish she had been, and yet though she regretted her blindness she did not regret the new understanding of exactly what Superman was. He was a suit, the cape and slicked-back hair only props. It wasn't Clark Kent who was Superman – it was Superman who was Clark Kent. So, whilst if you physically stripped back the layers of Clark Kent's clothing you would find the Superman suit underneath, if you stripped back the layers of Superman's façade you would find that Clark Kent had been there all along.

Then Lois remembered something else, something that comforted her in a way that went back to the very roots of her friendship and eventually love with both Clark Kent _and_ Superman. It had been something a friend of hers, an actor, had once said;

_"When I play a role, if I play it long enough, that person I'm pretending to be becomes a part of me. And whenever I play a role, I also try and put a part of myself into that character. So, that person I am on stage __**isn't**__ me, but we both influence each other – and there may be commonalities between the two of us."_

Lois looked at the man she loved and the suit he held and realised at last that it had only even been the commonalities she had loved.

"Lois?" Martha Kent asked, from the farmhouse in Smallville in which Superman was created, a product of her son's imagination. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," Lois said, smiling at Clark. "I'm fine."

And she walked across to the sink and ran the tap, watching as the mud swirled from the suit, then reached for a sponge and started to scrub.

888

**A/N:** A cookie to anyone who can see where I have tried to make a reference to the Naturalistic Fallacy (a philosophical... thing which totally ruins any attempt to make sense of good and evil – "you cannot take an ought from an is"), which I was recently taught in a philosophy lesson and has confused me ever since.

I am aware that I have probably over-exaggerated the extent to which Superman is merely an 'invention', but I just wanted to take things from the opposite side than they usually are - and the way that they are for a large part taken from in 'Lois and Clark'. But feel free to disagree!

Please tell me what you think!


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